Dead to the World: Rape, Unconsciousness, and Social Media

Here is a teaching worksheet I put together for instructors who want to include this article on their syllabi, whether in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Philosophy, or Media Studies.

NEWS:

Here are a few relevant news stories. Sadly, there is a steady flow:

The issue of sexual assault against women who are anaesthetized was little more than a footnote to “Dead to the World,” but it is not just an aberration of the occasional unethical doctor but rather an institutionalized practice in medical schools.

Bill Cosby has been sentenced to between three and ten years in prison for sexually assaulting Andrea Constand after drugging her. Over 60 women came forward to accuse him of similar crimes, over decades.

A court decision in the Canadian province of Ontario has made it easier for those accused of sexual assault to use intoxication as a defence.

What’s it about?

A recent popular focus on sexual assault cases involving women who are unconscious—whether because drunk, drugged, anesthetized, in a coma, or asleep—has drawn attention to the role of social media in both exacerbating and gaining redress for the harms of rape while unconscious. To be violated while “dead to the world” is a complex wrong: it scarcely seems to count as a “lived experience” at all, yet it often shatters the victim’s body schema and world. This essay situates cultural anxiety about women’s unconsciousness and sexual assault while offering a phenomenological analysis of its harms. Sexual assault in these situations, and especially rape (defined as penetration of the body by another object or body part), exploits and reinforces any victim’s absence from the shared world, and exposes her body in ways that make it especially difficult for her to reconstitute herself as a subject. It damages both her ability to engage with the world in four dimensions (through a temporally persisting body schema) and her ability to retreat from it into anonymity.

Although this phenomenological analysis is generalizable, the exposure of the body’s surface and the two-dimensional visibility it analyses are wrongs within the context of the racialization and sexualization of bodies. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s account of the racial-epidermal schema in the context of Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of “night” and anonymity, the article argues that rape while unconscious can make the restful anonymity of sleep impossible, leaving only the violent exposure of a two-dimensional life. This effect is doubled and redoubled for women in visibly racialized and sexually stereotyped groups—who are, contra media fixation, the more likely to be sexually assaulted.

There is another layer to this lived experience: the way the assault is played back to the victim after the fact can draw out the experience in a way that forecloses her future, and this is especially true given contemporary communications technologies. By providing a richer phenomenological analysis of the lived experience of rape in these circumstances, and by showing its complexity and ubiquity, I hope to undermine the trivialization of this kind of offense, and to challenge pervasive attitudes of victim blaming that permeate popular commentary on sexual violence against women who are unconscious or semiconscious.

I gave various pieces of the article as talks around North America and in the UK in 2014 and 2015 and that was very helpful for its development. I’ve also heard from many students and academics that they are longing for philosophically engaged work on sexual violence that can be taught, to supplement various kinds of political work or administrative action against sexual assault, especially on campus.

Reference:

Cressida J. Heyes, “Dead to the World: Rape, Unconsciousness, and Social Media.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41:2, January 2016.